Elegy for an Angel's Wing
Alan McKee
Digital Artist
Digital Painter
NFTs
Projections
Light Paintings
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All images and videos on this site are the sole property of Alan McKee and may not be copied in any form without written permission. ©Copyright 2023
DIGITAL ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
“The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit.This two-way transformation proceeds from metaphysical perceptions, for metaphysics is the search for the essential nature of reality. And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality. Such is the magic act which takes place continuously in the development of a work of art. On this and only on this is creation based.”​
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--Hans Hofmann, The Search for the Real
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The quote above says everything about my own philosophy of art in a very succinct paragraph . However, Digital Art has unique characteristics. It realizes the dream of the Impressionists, to paint with light, and allows us to create works with more vivid colours than was possible before digital art. The colour space of “natural” media was always dulled by the binders and admixtures necessary to hold the paint or chalk together. My digital art paintbrush is a pressure sensitive Wacom stylus and my digital paints are made of light in all the visible colours of the spectrum. I also use traditional photography tools like my medium format Rolleiflex, and large format Ebony camera. These are my building blocks in combination with my digital skills.
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I learned my skills working as a free-lance creative for various clients and ad agencies across north America. As I worked, I was fascinated with the potential of the computer to create new ways of seeing and making visual art. Beginning with some of the first software and early computers I spent over twenty years honing my skills. And that is the road I have traveled and will continue to travel as I now start to add sound and music to my visual work with the theremin, having studied classical music while still very young.
In the 1960s I had the good fortune to meet and talk to some of the most famous names in 20th Century art because my mother, Marjorie McKee, was an abstract expressionist painter and student of one of the most important art teachers of that era, Hans Hofmann. But no matter how many great painters I met, digital technology kept calling to me with new, unimagined possibilities.
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I also grew up frequently visiting the artists' studio at DC Comics on Lexington Avenue in NYC, where my father, Alvin Schwartz, worked during the so-called "golden age" of comics for more than thirty years. Watching these highly skilled craftsmen work was one of the joys of my youth. It stood me in good stead when, twenty years later I tried my own hand at comics, producing a supernatural story, The Instrument of Death, for DC with editor Murray Boltonoff for Tales of the Unexpected. Back in those days, though, comics were frowned on as being "not good for children," so I moved on to advertising as a way to make a steady living.
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ALAN McKEE AND THE OCCULT TRADITION
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by Edward Lucie-Smith
Former art critic of the London Sunday Times
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Alan McKee’s work, which combines digitized photography and advanced techniques of image manipulation using the computer with a strong mystical feeling for nature belongs to a distinguished tradition that now stretches back for more than 150 years.
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The link between mystical feeling and technology is a persistent theme in the story of the Modern Movement in art. This was especially true of those leading artists, chief among them Kandinsky and Mondrian, though there were also numerous others, who were attracted to the doctrines of Theosophy, which aimed to combine aspects of the great oriental reli- gions, Hinduism and Buddhism, with modern scienti c thought. Helena P Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Movement, wrote in The Secret Doctrine [1888]: “It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of matter, and the in nite divisibility of the atom, that the whole science of Occultism is built. It opens limitless horizons to substance informed by the divine breath of its soul in every possible state of tenuity.”
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Alan McKee’s work therefore presents itself as a new phase in a long and distinguished development. One perceives in it an intricate interweaving of ideas, as well as the con dent use of the latest digital imaging techniques.
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Essentially what he does is to combine two apparently contradictory strands of development. The actual structure of his compositions is based on the work of artists such as Jozef Albers, Max Bill and Ellsworth Kelly, but this is overlaid with imagery taken directly from nature. In a certain sense, a close parallel to the way they are composed can be found in certain Japanese screens, which also combine a dramatic abstract framework with exquisite details taken direct- ly from nature. Another parallel is with certain kinds of contemporary stage design. One can imagine some of these images serving as maquettes for scenes in Mozart’s Magic Flute, or for Klingsor’s garden in Wagner’s Parsifal. This sug- gests that the spectator’s relationship with them is not static, but shifting and dynamic. It also suggests that there will be, for many people who look at them, a synaesthetic element, that is, they are quite likely to suggest sounds, as part of the total experience. This is a factor that helps to strengthen the link between McKee’s work and the Occultist tradition to which I have already referred. In fact, if one cares to trace it, this did not stop short with the early Modernists, but passed through many variations during the course of the 20th century. One member of this tradition is Jackson Pollock, who, when he was young, at- tended Theosophical retreats at Ojai in California. His wife Lee Krasner often spoke of the impression these events made on him. It is therefore not surprising to find a new manifestation of the same spirit in Canada.
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ALAN McKEE by John K. Grande,
International art critic
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"As intricate interweavings of nature imagery, these works build their own architectonic structures out of visual material. They recombine the visual in a very textual way. The grammar of this imagery is ultimately built in the same intricate but logical way that phrases, sentences and paragraphs are. These visual weavings involve an essential symbolism and layering. While each element is pulled from reality, it is also indeed a detail of some greater intuited reality. Thus reconfigured, Alan McKee's image fragments ultimately metamorphose into sublime artworks. Their sublimity rests upon an acute sense that life itself is a fleeting, and ultimately illusionistic process-part fact, part fiction."
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ALAN MCKEE CV
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SOLO SHOWS:
Galerie D’este, Montreal, 2007
Gallery IX, Toronto, 2008
Contact Photography Festival Exhibit
EXPOS:
Artists Project 2015
Toronto
Oxford International Art Fair 2015
Oxford, UK
GROUP SHOWS:
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Quest Art's 2020 TD Thor Wealth Management Juried Exhibition
Quest for the Environment Committee
January 2021
Ontario Society of Artists
Open Juried Exhibition
Nov 4-Dec 1, 2020
Amazing Moss Park Art Collective
September 2020
Fleck Gallery, Toronto
Dec 1-Dec 19 2017
Red Head Gallery
Christmas 2017
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Snap To Grid
December 10-January 2, 2016.
Arta Gallery, Distillery Toronto
April 11 to 28 , 2015
Agora Gallery, Chelsea
September 18, 2014 to Oct 7, 2014
New York City, USA
Gaia, soul of a planet, Galleria Lambert Brookfield Place Toronto, 2008 International Art On Climate
Change, ACA Gallery Salon Show April 3rd to 13th 2009
ON-LINE GALLERIES:
NABS.org Exhibition
MOCA Museum of Computer Art
http://moca.virtual.museum/autogallery2011/autogallery_mckee
Member Center for Fine Art Photography
Scarborough Arts Council Big Art Book 2013 publication of Rain and haiku Alan_Mckee
REVIEWS AND PUBLICATIONS:
Scarborough Arts Council Big Art Book 2013 publication of Rain and haiku Group show at Project
Gallery, August 2013
Empty Easel
http://emptyeasel.com/2016/06/14/alan-mckee-digital-abstract-expressionism/
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Publications review by international art critic Edward Lucie- Smith and by John Grande
Vie des Arts by international art/nature critic John Grande, 2007
In private collections in Canada, USA and Europe
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*A Note on Print Materials
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Most of my prints are printed on Fuji matte paper on the Lightjet, a digital enlarger that produces a print with the same quality and longevity as a high quality darkroom printed photo. They are mounted on aluminum or dibond and covered with UV protective Plexiglas. In some cases they are face mounted on plexiglas. Occasionally, I also have prints made on Epson inkjet printers.
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Custom works are available by special request for designers and architects.
